President Trump appointed Matt Whitaker as acting attorney general last week, despite the fact that he cannot legally hold the office. While the president could fix his mistake with any lesser official in any normal time, the attorney general is no lesser official and this is no normal time. Whitaker takes office during a time of extreme constitutional conflict involving investigations of the president, claims of abuse of law-enforcement and national-security powers, and combat between the executive and legislative branches. In order to prevent a breakdown of federal law enforcement, the White House should hurry to select a permanent attorney general before any more damage is done.

Trump named Whitaker to replace Jeff Sessions, who resigned at the request of the White House the day after the November midterm elections. In an example of the small-ball politics at work, Whitaker reportedly came to the attention of the White House because of his publicly expressed criticism of the special counsel investigation into collusion between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign. Before joining the Justice Department as Sessions’s chief of staff, Whitaker had urged that the inquiry’s scope be limited, saying that otherwise it could start to look like a “political fishing expedition.” After FBI agents raided the home of the Trump campaign’s former chair, Paul Manafort, Whitaker tweeted: “Do we want our Gov’t to ‘intimidate’ us?” and linked to a Fox News story that said the raid was “designed to intimidate.”